
British firm Lanzante has been preparing racing cars and converting many for road use since 1983. The team even won the 24 Hours of Le Mans with a McLaren F1 GTR in 1995, but the machine it has just created may just be its most outrageous feat yet.
What looks like a Porsche 930 Turbo is actually a hand-built, carbon-fiber car powered by a race-used Formula 1 engine from the ’80s. Where other firms are building restomods, these guys have created a restomonster.
Lanzante built a similar machine (called the TAG Turbo) before, but that one was a one-off.
The TAG Championship version will be built and sold in a very limited number of just three cars, with the number being a celebration of the three consecutive F1 championships McLaren bagged between 1984 and 1986.

Each car will be named after the driver and the year, and fitted with a genuine, race-used TAG TTE P01 1.5-liter V6 twin-turbo.
The first car in the series will be displayed at the upcoming Goodwood Festival of Speed, and carry the name Championship ’85.
Its engine raced across the 1984, 1985, and 1986 seasons, and helped Alain Prost to two podiums on the journey to his first world championship title. Naturally, just chucking one of these mental powerplants into the back of a road-legal supercar wouldn’t be a good idea, so the block got thoroughly reengineered by Cosworth.
It now features new pistons, new con rods, new valves and valve springs, revised cams, a new airbox, new cooling, a new exhaust system, and newly developed lightweight titanium turbos.

All of this work also got officially certified by McLaren, making this one very rare and extraordinary sports car. It’s a very light one, too, weighing just 920kg.
That’s over 400kg less than the Porsche 930 Turbo donor car that still provides the basic shell for this project.
Most of this weight saving is down to ample use of F1-grade carbon fiber for the majority of body parts. The wheels also shave a few kilos off, and on top of that are specially made, larger 18-inch magnesium and carbon rims of the original race car, made by the same company that made the originals, Dymag.

The result of all of this engineering magic is an F1-powered Porsche that can rev up to 10,250rpm and churn out 625hp. Top speed is north of 300km/h, and power is transmitted via a custom Porsche 993 six-speed manual box with bespoke ratios.
New carbon-ceramic brakes have also been fitted to slow everything down again. The paint job of the first car is inspired by Prost’s 1985 helmet design, and the company claims that the car has retained all of its everyday drivability.
As it’s fully road-legal, this means three lucky people will get to enjoy 1980s F1 feelings every day of the week.
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